Always she was brought back to Grenoble when she saw him thus, manlike, with his gaze steadily fixed on the task.  If New York itself withheld recognition, could Grenoble—­provincial and conservative Grenoble, preserving still the ideas of the last century for which his family had so unflinchingly stood—­be expected to accord it?  New York!  New York was many, many things, she knew.  The great house could have been filled from weekend to week-end from New York; but not with Graingers and Pendletons and Stranger; not with those around the walls of whose fortresses the currents of modernity still swept impotently; not with those who, while not contemning pleasure, still acknowledged duty; not with those whose assured future was that for which she might have sold her soul itself.  Social free lances, undoubtedly, and unattached men; those who lived in the world of fashion but were not squeamish—­Mrs. Kame, for example; and ladies like Mrs. Eustace Rindge, who had tried a second throw for happiness,—­such votaries of excitement would undoubtedly have been more than glad to avail themselves of the secluded hospitality of Grenoble for that which they would have been pleased to designate as “a lively time.”  Honora shuddered at the thought:  And, as though the shudder had been prophetic, one morning the mail contained a letter from Mrs. Kame herself.

Mercifully Hugh had not noticed it.  Honora did not recognize the handwriting, but she slipped the envelope into her lap, fearful of what it might contain, and, when she gained the privacy of her rooms, read it with quickening breath.  Mrs. Kame’s touch was light and her imagination sympathetic; she was the most adaptable of the feminine portion of her nation, and since the demise of her husband she had lived, abroad and at home, among men and women of a world that does not dot its i’s or cross its t’s.  Nevertheless, the letter filled Honora with a deep apprehension and a deeper resentment.  Plainly and clearly stamped between its delicately worded lines was the claim of a comradeship born of Honora’s recent act.  She tore the paper into strips and threw it into the flames and opened the window to the cool air of the autumn morning.  She had a feeling of contamination that was intolerable.

Mrs. Kame had proposed herself—­again the word “delicately” must be used —­for one of Honora’s first house-parties.  Only an acute perception could have read in the lady’s praise of Hugh a masterly avoidance of that part of his career already registered on the social slate.  Mrs. Kame had thought about them and their wonderful happiness in these autumn days at Grenoble; to intrude on that happiness yet awhile would be a sacrilege.  Later, perhaps, they would relent and see something of their friends, and throw open again the gates of a beautiful place long closed to the world.  And—­without the air of having picked the single instance, but of having chosen from many—­Mrs. Kame added that she had only lately seen Elsie Shorter, whose admiration for Honora was greater than ever.  A sentiment, Honora reflected a little bitterly, that Mrs. Shorter herself had not taken the pains to convey.  Consistency was not Elsie’s jewel.